Sexuality and Trauma: Zhang Yixuan’s The Love that is Temporary and a Farewell Letter

In this chapter, I will conduct a comparative reading of Zhang Yixuan’s (張亦絢) The Love that is Temporary (愛的不久時) and A Farewell Letter (永別書) and discuss the female protagonists’ traumatic memories caused by domestic violence and intimate partner violence. The two novels are written in the fashion of “traumatic realism,” a term proposed by Rothberg (2000) in an attempt to “produce the traumatic event as an object of knowledge and to program and thus transform its readers so that they are forced to acknowledge their relationship to posttraumatic culture” (p. 103). As both protagonists are writers and the stories are narrated in the first-person perspective, they represent the traumatic realism “under the sign of trauma” through “self-reflexive metanarrative techniques” (Chen, 2020, p. 46). I argue that the self-reflections of the two female protagonists point to the issues of sex and sexuality, as a possible leeway in processing their traumatic memories.